Mississippi Burning Killings: Religious Terrorism?

Last updated on: July 9, 2014 at 2:32 pm by Guest Contributor

Mississippi Burning Killings: Religious Terrorism? 2014-07-09T14:32:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Samuel Holloway Bowers, the first Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi and the mastermind behind the slayings of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, 50 years ago, did not fit the caricature of a backwards racist. College educated as an engineer at the University of Southern California and at Tulane University, associates described him as an ideologically driven strategist.
“He is very intelligent. I have no question about that,” Thomas Tarrants, once the self-described chief terrorist for Bowers, told journalist Patsy Sims for her book The Klan. “And I believe he was like I was, indoctrinated, brainwashed… Absorbed into an ideology that took on the awe of a holy cause and blinded his mind to everything else. I think Sam believes what he is doing is right and has the sanction of God.”

Tarrants later renounced racism and is currently an ordained, evangelical minister. But at one time he saw himself as occupying the same unique space as Bowers in the counter-revolution against integration and desegregation: that of a holy warrior. As Bowers described it, in 1994, to theologian Charles Marsh:

“There are two really powerful figures in the world: the priest and the preacher. I think I came here as a priest, though not a preacher. A priest is interested in visible, public power relations; this is what makes him powerful as a warrior. A preacher is an evangelist; he will tell people what to do. But the priest will arrange the means and operations to implement this into concrete action. When the priest sees the heretic, he can do only one thing: he eliminates him.”

Scholars, if they pay any attention to it at all, have been confused by Bowers’ open professions that religion drove his activities. Religion, to many historians, was simply a cover for white supremacists of all stripes to retroactively justify their racial animus — epitomized by the ritual burning of the cross. Even as a rare exceptions to this mindset among scholars, Marsh still viewed Bowers through the prism of mainstream Christianity, where religion is one motivating force behind Bowers activities, but where Bowers used creative interpretations and rationalizations of the Bible to justify his actions. Anyone who accepts communism — which for Bowers included almost anyone in or who supported the civil rights movement — had embraced a Godless ideology and relinquished God’s grace. In this rendering, Bowers is still a reactionary, vigilante racist, but one who attempts to sincerely reconcile his actions with his conventional, Christian faith.

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